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SPECIAL
FALL EDITION |
| Board Establishes Renewal Commission for Antioch College |
| National Search Planned to Find New President |
| University Overview |
Student Reflections from the Field
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State
of the College
June
28, 2003
President Joan Straumanis '57
The state of the College is that it remains a fine, high quality, liberal arts institution with high standards. Our students are as bright as past students, and they go on to do just as exciting things. You would recognize every one of them. We would not exchange the student body we have for the student body of any other college—we just want more of them.
Every year, the graduating students present their senior projects to the community. The quality of these projects is so inspiring that I invite you personally, especially those of you who are academics with your own high academic standards, to come here during the last part of April for the public presentations of the senior projects. You will be thrilled and you will be inspired.
Reunion 2003 is the first event in a year of celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Antioch. José Ramos-Horta ’96—Nobel Peace Prize winner, Foreign Minister of East Timor and Antioch graduate—came here from Asia to kick off our anniversary celebration. Other events this year will include a conference on October 24th titled “The Courage of Social Scientists,” to be held in honor of Bob Krinsky ’57 for his service to the Antioch Board of Trustees. We will have famous social scientists returning to this campus. Among the participants that we expect are Clifford Geertz ’50, Fred Greenstein ’53, Allan Pred ’57, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein ’55, and Heinz Eulau, former professor of Government.
We hope that all of our five MacArthur Fellows, the living ones, will be returning to the campus. We have agreements from several of them to do just that. Antioch boasts seven MacArthur Fellows, the same number as Princeton. In rough terms, this means that if you go to Princeton, you have about a one in 30,000 chance of being a MacArthur Fellow; if you go to Antioch, your chance is about one in 3,000!
Also, Eleanor Holmes Norton ’60, DC’s elected Delegate to the United States Congress, will be the Chatterjee Peace Lecturer on February18. Please be watching for more announcements of wonderful events throughout the year.
Another change that you may have noticed during the past year is greatly improved communications with alumni. Rachel Moulton ’97, Director of Communications, is the key person responsible for those beautiful Antiochians that you have been getting this year after a hiatus of more than a year. Email Rachel at alumni@antioch-college.edu. We also have a new employee whose job it is to coordinate volunteer efforts in Admissions. Her name is Mary Laskowski ’02, and her email address is mary@antioch-college.edu.
Another innovation has been the work of the Committee of 150, inviting skilled professionals in various fields to offer pro bono services to the College, which we would otherwise not be able to afford. Here are some examples: a public relations team, an environmental attorney, a management consultant, a sound technician, a landscape architect, and translators, all working with us on a volunteer basis.
The College has hired seven tenure track faculty this year. Most of these were replacements for people who had resigned, or faculty in visiting positions. Many debate the need for tenure, but I personally will defend tenure to the hilt. It is something that we must offer to faculty in order to keep Antioch College competitive in its academic market. We don’t pay faculty very much, but tenure is a gift that we can give to increase faculty motivation and stability. We have learned from our research that when faculty leave, students leave with them.
Co-op is in good shape and getting better. Pat Linn, J.D. Dawson Professor of Cooperative Education and Professor of Psychology, has been doing research on Co-op for some time and perhaps you have heard her presentations. One of her stunning results is that in her cohort of women who graduated from Antioch in the ’40s—these are women in their seventies now—100 percent had careers outside of the home!
Antioch Education Abroad (AEA) is thriving. Many of the students who take advantage of our international programs come from other colleges (and some of them transfer to Antioch afterwards). Our newest effort is a relationship with two indigenous communities in Western Australia. Students will first study at Perth, and then travel into the Kimberley Mountains to co-op, working with aboriginal communities on economic development projects.
Another innovation, unfamiliar to some of you, is community service. We are not talking about co-op now, but service to this community, Yellow Springs, and nearby towns during study periods. This is a very important link with the community, and our students learn a great deal.
I also have news about educational opportunities for you. You’ve heard from Dan Kaplan ’76 about the PhD in Leadership and Change. It is a low-residency degree program of excellent quality. Participants stay in their home communities, work, and use their careers as the material for developing their knowledge of leadership and change. The full-time faculty is wonderful and has been recruited from across the country.
Another low-residency program I’d like to advertise is the Antioch College, campus-based, degree-completion program for non-graduate alumni. During the last month, I’ve had a housemate in the President’s house: a 78-year-old woman, Barbara Lichtenstein Bick, who left Antioch in ’45. She came back this year to complete her degree. This program requires just a little bit of residential time, one month in the summer, and then one completes all other academic requirements through correspondence with faculty.
We have been challenged this year by the loss of several deans. Hassan Nejad, who served as Dean of Faculty for many years, will be retiring back to the faculty as he has long wished to do. We have replaced him with Dr. Rick Jurasek who comes to us from Augustana College in Illinois where he is currently Dean. Before that he spent 22 years at Earlham, our neighbor to the west, teaching German and serving as Associate Dean. We’re very pleased to have Rick join us.
The Dean of Students, who joined us last September, has returned to her previous university. I guess that they made her an offer that she couldn’t refuse. We are reorganizing the whole student services area to clarify responsibility, to improve functioning, and to concentrate attention where attention is most needed. After extensive community discussion about that reorganization, two Co-Deans of Students have been appointed: Jimmy Williams as Dean of Student Life and Cheryl Keen as Dean of Community Learning. In addition, we have a newly appointed Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Michael Thorpe, who has been Director of Admissions at Lawrence College in Wisconsin.
Now let me talk about finances. Our finances are quite precarious. Each budget is a new struggle. This year we had mid-year cuts of approximately $500,000, very hard to take out of a very pared down budget. We managed it with community cooperation—no protests, no anger—just collaboration and hard work. Our budget process has been completely open.
We are proposing to sell 22-acres of land. It’s in the southern part of town, not contiguous to the College, and not land that we can foresee needing at any point in the future. It’s zoned residential. It may be the peak of the market. We believe it’s the right time to sell the land. The advantage is that we don’t need land and we do need money. The disadvantage is that you can’t do this more than once!
Let me give you an analysis of our main problems. We have three problems, and three solutions.
1) We don’t have enough students. We are an inefficient campus. We have between 600-650 matriculating students, but that’s not enough. We need to enlarge our classes. One way is through more effective admissions. We believe there are at least two Antioch students in every high school graduating class in America, but it’s very hard to target them. We aren’t a regional school or a local school; we’re a national school, and so it’s very hard to find those two students who live in every community across the country.
2) Retention is problem number two. We bleed students. They leave for a variety of reasons. This is nothing new. This happened when I was a student; this happened when you were students. The graduation rates at Antioch have always been relatively low. What this means to me, to put a “presidential spin” on it, is that people value an Antioch education more than they value an Antioch degree.
We really need to hold on to our students. It’s a vicious cycle: the more budget pressure we are under, the harder it is to give students the services that they need, the faculty that they need, the courses that they need, the campus that they need, and the dormitories that they need to keep them here.
We have implemented many of the recommendations of last year’s Admissions Commission, and the Retention Commission has just completed its work. The most important outcome from both commissions is high quality research about why people come, why they don’t come, why they stay and why they don’t stay. What we have learned is that two primary reasons students leave Antioch are the condition of the dormitories, and an insufficient number of faculty in the Cooperative Education Department. This is very interesting to me. It’s good research, which tells me where to put our first dollars, when we have new dollars.
3) The third problem, with its attendant solution, has to do with our lack of an endowment. All of our competitor colleges have substantial endowments. Oberlin, which is a close competitor, has an endowment of over $525 million, and as you know, our endowment is under $30 million. Though we have had wonderful recent progress in building an endowment, we are not competitive with other liberal arts colleges in this respect.
So these are our three problems; together they produce our financial difficulties; and they are solved by better admissions, better retention, better research in both, and the Campaign for Antioch, about which you will soon learn much more.
In conclusion, whenever this old world seems especially threatening to all we hold dear, it also surprises us with some new reason to get up in the morning. Who knew we’d receive that kind of encouragement from the supreme court! In one week they have affirmed affirmative action, at least in principal. And get this: Sex between consenting adults is not a crime! Well! Let’s wish together for a future of more such victories for common sense, as well as for humanity.